the Voice of
The Communist League of Revolutionary Workers–Internationalist
“The emancipation of the working class will only be achieved by the working class itself.”
— Karl Marx
the Voice of
The Communist League of Revolutionary Workers–Internationalist
“The emancipation of the working class will only be achieved by the working class itself.”
— Karl Marx
Jun 9, 2025
Trump’s “Big, Beautiful Tax Bill” has passed the House and gone to the Senate for approval. Trump’s bill will mean big cuts to Medicaid and food stamps (SNAP).
According to a study by the National Bureau of Economic Research, cutbacks to those health care and food programs will mean the early deaths of tens of thousands more poor and working-class people. But when you are one of the politicians supporting these cuts, who cares about more workers dying?
Iowa senator Joni Ernst certainly doesn’t. When she was confronted at a town hall by someone who said the Medicaid cuts will mean, “People are going to die,” Ernst sarcastically responded, “We are all going to die.” The next day, instead of apologizing, Ernst doubled down and posted more flippant comments about people dying.
Then there was Mehmet Oz, who Trump put in charge of the Center for Medicaid and Medicare. Oz said that people on Medicaid and SNAP “can prove that they matter” by meeting the new work requirements. But Oz has it backwards. Trump and the politicians behind this bill have already proved that people on Medicaid and SNAP don’t matter to them. These politicians know damn well that many people will not be able to qualify under the new rules, because they wrote the bill specifically so that many people would not qualify. They have already calculated in their “Big Beautiful Bill” that they will be cutting over 600 billion dollars out of Medicaid and at least 250 billion dollars out of SNAP. They have already calculated that they will be taking benefits away from as many as 11 million people.
For Ernst and Oz and Trump and the other political servants of the wealthy class, these 11 million working-class people “don’t matter.” What matters to them is that in their “Big Beautiful Bill” they plan to give trillions of dollars in tax cuts to the richest of the rich. In order to pay for these giveaways to the wealthy, Trump and the other politicians have to take money away from someone else. So, they are planning to take it from the working class, knowing that it means more people will die. They are like vultures preying on dead carcasses, except that vultures don’t kill people in the first place.